John Watershas made bad taste about as delicious as any filmmaker sinceHerschel Gordon Lewis. His reveling in all things crass, grotesque, and transgressive made for a rallying cry against the conservative upbringing that Waters lived through as a young man. The gradual critical and commercial success of hismicrobudgeted independent filmsgathered enough steam that he began to slide more into the mainstream, with his first major attempt at that beingPolyester. True to Waters' style, he took that as an opportunity to mess with his prospective new audience members, rather than embracing them with open arms. He saw a chance to thumb his nose at any preconceived notions that he wouldsoften his approach to a wider audiencein a notoriously smelly way.
A suburban housewife’s world falls apart when she finds that her pornographer husband is serially unfaithful to her, her daughter is pregnant, and her son is suspected of being the foot-fetishist who’s been breaking local women’s feet.
What Is ‘Polyester’ About?
Polyesterfollows Francine Fishpaw (John Waters' museDivine), who is a homemaker just trying to keep a happy household in the very-average suburbs. It’s too bad, then, that all of her family members despise her for no good reason. Her husband, Elmer (David Samson), is a horrifically abusive caricature of every toxic sitcom dad who gets protested daily for running a porn theater. Her teenage son, Dexter (Ken King), is a notorious foot fetishist who spends his free time breaking feet that he finds attractive. Her teenage daughter, Lu-Lu (Mary Garlington), makes money by dancing on tables for the boys at lunchtime. Her only real friend is Cuddles (Edith Massey), who spends most of her time flaunting her extravagant wealth while still trying to be supportive of Francine’s plight. If Francine is going to have any hope of breaking out of this web of abuse and taking back control of her life, she’s going to have to follow her nose to find the answers.
For his first swing at universal acclaim,Waters looked to drawfromthe artistic inspiration ofDouglas Sirk,overheating the style of his world to a hyperrealistic degree. Sirk’s films sought to draw satirical attention to the ridiculous standards and performative emptiness of heteronormative conformist upper-middle-class American culture. Using a combination of distended acting, plastically pristine camerawork, and injecting incisive subtext into the framing and coding of the mise-en-scène and dialogue, Sirk was openly mocking the audience most likely to be paying to see his films. In a similar vein, Waters poke fun at the people who were finally going to show up to one of his movies, and he affectionately mimicked some of the trademarks of Sirk’s style.
While it’s still recognizable as a John Waters film,Polyestermostly cribs from Sirk in how it skewers the cozy comfort of suburbia with itssoap opera mentality, notably scuzzed up with Waters' signature rawness and sense of unfiltered mania. The camerawork is more handheld than anything Sirk did, but Waters andcinematographerDave Insleypaid attention to his use of color and lighting to exaggerate the setting so that Francine’s inner turmoil bubbles out onto the screen. Waters' touch for interpreting dialogue was never quite as adept as Sirk’s, as he still erred in making the commentary comparatively more out-in-the-open, as was his wont to be unapologetic. But it’s in the acting of Divine that Waters implements his greatest instance of subversion, one so potent that it doubles back on his own filmography at that point.
John Waters Subverts His Own Proclivities With Francine Fishpaw
In Waters' previous films,Mondo Trash,Multiple Maniacs, andFemale Trouble, Divine was presented as a whirling dervish of unkempt insanity, gleefully engaging in anarchy and wanton tomfoolery. She served as the perfect vessel for Waters' manifesto of rejoicing in noncomformity against the stodgy morals of the world she was stuck in. But as Francine, Divine starts out as a person craving to have a “normal” and happy family, utterly bereft of any idea how to fix her dire situation. It isn’t until she’s forced into a situation that calls her to take action for the sake of her dignity that her anger and trauma come to the surface, and that’s when the Divine that Waters' built-in audience were so familiar with really comes out.
Divine was always a much better actress than her initial reputation as “drag queen turned amateur actress” sold her as, able to modulate her persona in a way that fit the material for each film that Waters cast her in. There’s no way you aren’t a skilled actress if you can evolve your touch from the brassy screeching of"Divine" inPink Flamingosto the sweet yet nagging doting of Edna Turnblad inHairspray, John Waters' most commercially successful mainstream film. In the case ofPolyester, she perfectly emulates the style of acting that was Sirk’s bread and butter, being heartbreakingly sincere in her frantic hysteria. It’s her commitment to the nonsense logic of her sense of smell being powerful enough to lead her to fix her life that sells it as an important enough part of the film to have the marketing be built around it.
How Smell Is Important to ‘Polyester’
Francine is a woman with a keen sense of smell, just one more layer of torture in a life full of misery. It seems as though every time she tries to enjoy something, an awful smell is shoved in her direction, ranging anywhere from a skunk wandering near her picnic or her mother shoving an old rotting shoe in her face. Not to mention the times she has to endure her husband’s farts, annoying pizza delivery boys carrying pizzas she didn’t order, and the stench of a drink that turned out to be pure gasoline. Her powers of smell even lead her to figure out that her husband was cheating on her with his secretary, Sandra (Mink Stole), as she smells out which hotel room they’re in. The one small reprieve she really gets is the new car smell of her lover, the dashing Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), who swoops in to rescue her from the lows ofdepressionandalcoholism. Even up to the end of the film, with Francine and her family fully reformed and truly happy together, it’s signified by her spraying air freshener over their group hug.The scents and odors Francine experiences serve as a physical manifestation of the arc she goes through on her way towards a happier life, and it’s a sign of Waters' knack for marketing that he’d hone in on the weirdest plot point and legitimizes it in such a shlocky way.
With his unofficial mainstream debut, Waters sought to “send up the overripe Hollywood melodramas of yesteryear” by making a movie that, to quote him, “really stunk.” Inspired by the advertising stunts oflegendary shockmasterWilliam Castleand an obscure thriller calledScent of Mysterythat is credited with inventing “Smell-O-Vision,” he wanted to assault his audience with the worst smells he could think of, relishing that “the audience would much rather smell a bad smell.” His idea was to create scratch-and-sniff cards that theaters would give to each audience member, numbered 1 through 10. The beginning of the film has a scientist explaining how the audience should scratch off a number when it appears on-screen, and the scratch will trigger a particular scent. As an extra prank, some of the smells straight up lied. For instance, the number associated with roses actually smelled like old shoes. Odorama was, allegedly, “such a hit that many subsequent screenings (as well as a few home-video releases) included the scratch-and-sniff cards.”
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John Waters never used a marketing stunt this extravagant for any of his future films, perhaps as a way of staying aligned with his desire to remain more accessible to a wider audience (untilA Dirty Shame, which was a proudly NC-17-rated return to form). That makes his use of something as off-base as Odorama as a way of underliningandundermining his grand entrance to the mainstream withPolyesterall the more special, perfectly exemplifying everything that makes John Waters, well, John Waters.
Polyesteris available to rent or buy on Prime Video in the U.S.
